Great Scott Gadgets is committed to supporting the open source community. One way we give back to the community is by giving away Free Stuff! If you or your community organization would like Free Stuff from Great Scott Gadgets, please fill out our Free Stuff Application to the best of your ability.

Our team judges applications based on community impact and clarity of project description, so please be detailed. Please know that this program is focused on supporting communities and requires your project be open source. We send hardware out to people looking to spread education, support community projects, or contribute to open source projects or research. We are not interested in sending hardware out to companies or to individuals for strictly personal use at this time.

Still have questions or need some advice? Here’s a basic walkthrough of the application!

Demographics

These questions help us get to know about you or your community organization and the projects you do. Information from this portion of the application is also essential for posts for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff blog posts - we want to make sure all of our information is correct!

Please tell us your:

Full name (and group name if you are applying as a group or organization!)

Email address (so you may be contacted if your application is selected)

Country

Pronouns (she/her, he/him, they/them, etc.) - Please note that failure to answer this question in a respectful manner is grounds for automatic disqualification! If you need help with this question, feel free to ask. Note: if applying for multiple people, it is okay to put they/them to refer to the collective group, or the pronouns of each individual member applying.

Social media accounts where you share your project work, if applicable

Project Details

These questions help us determine the eligibility of your project for our Free Stuff Program. Applications that are accepted are usually as detailed as possible and give us a good idea of how one of our products will be incorporated into a project.

Please tell us:

• What Free Stuff would you like to receive? Please note that we typically only send out one device to a recipient, unless otherwise appropriate.

Please describe the project you will be using the requested device for. Please note that applications that are accepted are usually 200+ words, so please be as descriptive as you can! A good start to an application can look like…

• ”We are a student-run hardware design lab at a university looking to give students access to tools they may not typically be able to afford or find in maker spaces. We offer workshops and have a planned curriculum planned to incorporate a HackRF One into a series of lessons on software-defined radio, wireless security testing, and digital signal analysis.”

• ”I am a university student seeking a HackRF One to implement into my thesis project where I will be building a digital radio receiver for decoding NOAA weather signals with open source software.”

• ”I’m an educational content creator looking to create a series of videos covering advanced RF projects that users at home can follow along with, backed up by open source documentation.”

While applications that typically get rejected look like…

• ”It’s my birthday and I want a Cynthion”

• ”I think it would be cool to have a HackRF One”

• ”I want to learn about SDR”

• What work have you already completed on your project? (Please include a link to an open source repository if you’ve got one).

• Why is the device you requested the right one for the project you are working on?

• What open source licensing are you using on your project? Examples of this can include MIT License, GNU Licenses, and Apache License, and more. Reminder that we typically require candidates’ projects to be open source.

Please do not submit any content that has been created or altered by a large language model or similar technology, including but not limited to ChatGPT, CoPilot, and Gemini.

Please note that Free Stuff Program applications remain valid through each calendar year. If you are not selected by the end of the year, your application will be considered void, but we encourage you to apply again when the next round of applications opens! If you have any questions about the application process, the status of your application, or the Free Stuff Program in general, you can email freestuff@greatscottgadgets for assistance.